John Cottingham is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Reading and an Honorary Fellow of St John's College, Oxford. His main research areas include philosophy of religion, moral philosophy, and early-modern philosophy. He is perhaps best known for his translation and commentary of René Descartes - in particular as co-editor and translator of the three-volume standard Cambridge edition of The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. In our conversation, we talk about his early train...
Aug 31, 2015•1 hr 13 min
This episode is recorded live in front of an audience at the International Association for Computing and Philosophy (IACAP) 2014 conference in Thessaloniki, Greece . The guests are four of the most interesting participants at that conference: Selmer Bringsjord, Gregory Chaitin, Mariarosaria Taddeo and Wilfried Sieg. They represent both diversity, all of them having quite different backgrounds and main research area, but they all have a common denominator in logic and formal methods. This forms t...
Nov 17, 2014•1 hr 12 min
Kristin Shrader-Frechette is O'Neill Family Professor at the Department of Biological Sciences and Department of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. She has previously held senior professorships at the University of California and the University of Florida. Author of 16 books and nearly 400 articles, Shrader-Frechette’s theoretical work appears in journals such as Biological Theory, Bioscience, Health Physics, Oikos, Philosophy of Science, Quarterly Review of Biology, Synthese, and Trend...
Jun 03, 2014•57 min
John Dupré is the director of the ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society and professor of philosophy at the University of Exeter. Dupré was educated at the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge and taught at Oxford, Stanford University and Birkbeck College of the University of London before moving to Exeter. Dupré’s chief work area lies in philosophy of biology, philosophy of the social sciences, and general philosophy of science. Together with Nancy Cartwright, Ian Hacking, Patrick ...
May 23, 2013•59 min
John Sutton is Professor of Cognitive Science at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He is currently head of the same department, having previously also been head of the Macquarie Philosophy department. He is author of Philosophy and Memory Traces:Descartes to Connectionism (Cambridge University Press, 1998), and co-editor of Descartes' Natural Philosophy and the Sage journal and Palgrave Macmillan book series Memory Studies . Sutton and I discuss a range of topics, including the occult i...
Apr 02, 2013•52 min
David Koepsell earned his PhD in philosophy as well as his law degree from the University at Buffalo, where he studied with Barry Smith. He has authored numerous articles as well as authored and edited several books, including Searle on the Institutions of Social Reality, The Ontology of Cyberspace: Law, Philosophy, and the Future of Intellectual Property. He has lectured worldwide on issues ranging from civil rights, philosophy, science, ontology, intellectual property theory, society, and reli...
Feb 13, 2013•1 hr 6 min
Michael Boylan is the John J. McDonnell jr chair in Ethics, and professor and chair of the philosophy department at Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia. In addition to being a poet and novelist, he has written more than 100 published articles and 25 books primarily in ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy of science, and the intersection of philosophy and literature. He was a fellow at the Center for American Progress, a Washington DC policy think tank from 2007-2009 and is...
Dec 06, 2012•1 hr 8 min
Peter Asaro is Assistant Professor at the School of Media Studies in the New School for Public Engagement, New York. His work examines the interfaces between social relations, human minds and bodies, artificial intelligence and robotics, and digital media. His current research focuses on the social, cultural, political, legal and ethical dimensions of military robotics and UAV drones, from a perspective that combines media theory with science and technology studies. Although dealing with topics ...
Oct 25, 2012•1 hr 11 min
Noel Sharkey is Professor of A.I. and Robotics, and Professor of Public Engagement at the University of Sheffield, but some of you may know him as the expert on the BBC series Robot Wars and Techno Games. We spend most of the episode talking about the dangers of autonomous robots in the battlefield, but we also get a glimpse into Noel’s multifaceted and unconventional background. The conviction, honesty and sense of urgency Noel brings to the table is important and contagious, so I hope it’ll pr...
Oct 01, 2012•1 hr 11 min
SuchThatCast goes mobile in the third episode, as I interview J.D. Trout on the appr. 2 hour train ride between Enschede and Schiphol airport. Trout is Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at Loyola University Chicago. I was a little concerned whether an interview on the train would work out, but although editing was a pain with all the background noise and announcement interruptions, the episode turned out to contain everything I want out of this podcast: a fascinating and inspiring backgroun...
Sep 16, 2012•1 hr 2 min
In this second episode, I talk to Wendell Wallach, who is a consultant, ethicist, and scholar at Yale University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics. Among many other things, Wendell co-authored (with Colin Allen) the influential Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right From Wrong (Oxford University Press 2009), which maps the new field of machine ethics. Wallach talks about his extraordinary career, from being a spiritual guru in the 1960s to becoming one of today’s leading authorities on mac...
Sep 03, 2012•1 hr 10 min
In this episode, Floridi takes the opportunity to reveal a driving force behind his philosophy that has never been publicly announced before. For anyone with some knowledge of Floridi’s philosophy, this will come as a huge surprise, and it will change how you perceive his theories from now on. We also discuss the state of computer and information ethics as a field, and how philosophy and academia needs to change radically in order to stay relevant and timely. We also discuss Kant’s noumenon, esp...
Aug 27, 2012•1 hr 3 min
